


All Days Are Nights

by LateStarter58



Series: The Felixstowe Sonnets - Tom and Cate [1]
Category: British Actor RPF, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Long-Distance Relationship, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 16:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17348453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LateStarter58/pseuds/LateStarter58
Summary: A wet and windy afternoon in a second-hand bookshop, an accident, and two lives are changed.





	All Days Are Nights

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of a series of drabbles in a series about a slow-burning, tragic-or-is-it romance, which I have given as gifts, usually for her birthday, to my dearest friend over several years. With her permission, I am sharing them here.

Strong hands; a fresh, clean fragrance; a flash of blue and golden curls; a toothy grin surrounded by a neat beard. First impressions endure, and these would live with her forever.

For a long time, she thought he had been a dream. He returned to her that way many times. It was only when she saw him again – in full Shakespearian costume on her TV screen – that she knew she hadn’t imagined him. He _was_ real; he was _that gorgeous._

‘Oof!’

‘Eheheheh’

She really should have been looking where she was going, but the book was so good and the whole store so intoxicating. And he shouldn’t have been sitting on the floor with his endless legs stretched out. It was asking for trouble.  And he shouldn’t have laughed.

‘Oh, my goodness! I’m so sorry!’

Sitting on his lap where she had landed she found herself speechless.

_How is he real?_

Afterwards, when they walked down the steep, winding hill to the windswept seafront, he kept apologising for his thoughtlessness. She almost began to get annoyed at his excessive British politeness but his voice was so bewitching that she hadn’t the heart to tell him to stop.  And _what_ he said held her entranced; about books, and Shakespeare and acting and the weather and the shop and she had stopped listening again because he was too beautiful.

It was her friend’s fault:

_‘You’re going to the coast after all? Then you must go to Felixstowe, to that second-hand bookshop I told you about. The owner’s a friend of a friend…the poetry section is second-to-none, darling. You’ll want to live there. It’s cosy and warm and full of secret corners. Just when you think you’ve got to the end, there’s another room beyond…  It’s like Narnia or Wonderland, only better coz it’s ALL BOOKS!’_

So she had landed up there; she had driven from London, parked her hire-car outside the unprepossessing entrance and stepped into paradise. As soon as she opened the door she felt at home, for the first time since she left Maryland. It was the smell.

Books.

Second-hand books.

Books that had been loved or hated, read or just dusted, cherished or ignored, and were now awaiting their next home. Waiting for her to come and caress their covers, turn their tired pages, read their lonely words and make them live again.

And so, she had; drifting in a dream of ecstasy through the stacks, browsing and occasionally picking up a volume. The owner had told her to make a pile of her choices on his already crowded desk, and she had done so, not knowing how she expected to get these books back across the Atlantic. They already weighed more than her entire baggage allowance and she had barely scratched the surface of this Aladdin’s cave. Autumn winds rattled the windows and every now and then some rain beat on the glass, but she was cocooned in her chrysalis of words.

Safe in the arms of the Romantic poets and the Bard, all was normal and safe until she turned the corner into the last, the furthest, the tiniest back room of the shop. She was reading Keats and floating on his words about the season:

**_Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?_ **

**_Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -_ **

****

A particularly powerful blast of Autumnal wind whistled through the eaves and she smiled to herself, rounding the corner still glued to _The Penguin Book of English Verse_ when it happened. 

She was falling, falling and then she wasn’t as strong hands and arms held her and lowered her onto his jeans to the soundtrack of his funny laugh. Her head turned of its own accord and she was up close and personal with the most beautiful face she had ever seen.

‘Oh, my goodness! I’m so sorry!’

Words failed her. His voice was as lovely as his looks. The top of her head seemed to be lifting, as if her mind was rising up into the sky, untethered. Suddenly she got a grip on herself and began to stand up. He helped her get to her feet, still apologising.

‘I am so sorry! I shouldn’t have sat on the floor, but the words began to absorb me and I just had to settle down and stay for a while.’

‘That’s OK, I’m OK; I wasn’t looking where I was going either. Same reason.’ She gestured with her book, and then she noticed his.

_The Sonnets. The MF SONNETS._

_No. This is NOT happening. A fucking Greek GOD in a bookstore and he is reading WILL, and not just Will but the FUCKING SONNETS?_

‘Are you a visitor?’

_Safe ground, talk about your trip. Except that he detects your accent and he asks and you talk about your heritage and then it’s all about Italy and how he worked there a coupla years before and he loved it and he looks into your eyes and you have to kick yourself awake because you could drown in there._

So it’s ‘Let’s have tea’ and they walked down the twisty-windy hill to the damp, windy, locked-up seafront, mostly deserted apart from some hardy dog-walkers and the most determined of kite-flyers. The landscape looked tired, jaded, but he guided her to a modern, pleasant restaurant with a nice-looking menu. He ordered afternoon tea and she looked and listened as he told her his story. An actor; and Shakespeare his great love.

She would have been OK; she might have survived and walked away intact and unaltered if not for two things: _he was reading the sonnets_ , and when asked, he told her his favourite was 43.

**_All days are nights to see till I see thee_ **

**_And nights bright days when dreams to show thee me._ **

****

And three years later, when _Henry IV Part One_ followed sweet, artistic, doomed _Richard II_ , there he was.

_Inhabiting Hal._

And _her_ doom was complete. She could never forget the damp, cloudy autumnal afternoon in a marvellous old bookshop when, thanks to Keats and Will, she fell into the lap of the most beautiful man in the world.

And whenever _he_ read Sonnet 43, he would think of the beautiful and mysterious Latin lady he caught one dark and rainy afternoon in Felixstowe.

His lips would form her name as he wondered what she was reading now.

**_How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made,_ **

**_By looking on thee in the living day…_ **

**_All days are nights to see till I see thee_ **

**_And nights bright days when dreams to show thee me._ **

 

_‘Cate…’_


End file.
